After years of seemingly every movie based on a video game franchise being varying degrees of terrible, it appeared as though we'd entered a sort of golden age. Between movies like the box office-winning The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Sonic the Hedgehog films, to TV adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout, it really looked like Hollywood figured out the secret sauce to making adaptations of games that were at worst entertaining and at best really good. Then the Borderlands movie happened.
Borderlands was destroyed by critics and not embraced by audiences. The film was an absolute box office bomb and it was everything that is bad about video game adaptations. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Borderlands game developer Gearbox Software, recently admitted to IGN that the movie was bad, but he says that nothing was “hurt” by the movie’s failure. In fact, the movie appears to have been a good thing on balance. Strauss explained…
Obviously that movie was disappointing. That said, it actually sold more catalog. So, I don't think it hurt at all, if anything I think it may have helped a little bit. It does highlight something that I've spoken about many times which is the difficulty of bringing our intellectual property to another medium.
Strauss says that Borderlands “sold more catalog,” indicating that Take-Two, who also publishes the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption games, among many others, may have sold the rights to more movies or TV based on their various titles on the back of the Borderlands movie getting produced. Even if the Borderlands movie flopping hard makes those projects less likely, Take-Two still made money selling the rights, so it was a plus for the company overall.
The CEO does say that the company’s IP may be especially difficult to be adapted into another medium. It’s unclear if he thinks there’s something specific about the games produced by Take-Two or if he’s speaking about video games more broadly. To be sure, there are still a lot more bad video game adaptations than there are good ones out there. But there are also plenty of upcoming video game adaptations, and it doesn't appear the Borderlands fiasco is slowing things down.
For a long time, the best game fans could hope for was video game adaptations that just weren't that bad. In recent years however, we've seen more attempts that are having success with both fans and critics. The best video game adaptations are actually really good movies.
Borderlands as a franchise is certainly going nowhere, as Borderlands 4 is set for release in the company’s next fiscal year. There’s no reason to believe the movie’s bad performance will have a negative impact on the game’s sales. People who love the games still love the games. If anything, it was fans of the Borderlands game that had some of the biggest issues with the movie. Specifically, fans didn't love that Borderlands was only rated PG-13 despite the fact it was apparently filmed to be rated R.
